Be quick and coming with coming up with decisions. In especially in new companies, you need to be extra quick and you need to be able to make right decisions very quickly. And if you make wrong ones, you need to learn from them very quickly because you need to grow very quickly and to let people know about your company. Because of the competition though, as I said, we don't have like a direct competitor. But the market is quite saturated. And now you need to move fast.
This is the MindShift Podcast where we share real stories, real strategies that will help you find real success. This is the place to hear from people just like you who have taken their ideas, goals and dreams from a point of inspiration to realization or when life knock them down from a point of breakdown to breakthrough. I'm your host Darrell Evans. Let's get started with today's episode.
Hey there, my name is Darrell Evans. Welcome to today's show here on The MindShift Podcast. If this happens to be your first time here and you enjoy today's show, I'd encourage you to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to the show right now. And if you're so inclined, leave us a five star rating and review on the Apple podcast system. If you want to chat with me about the show any takeaways, any insights, any breakthroughs? Be sure to hit me up on Instagram
@MrDarrellEvans. My guest today is Araks Nalbandyan. She is the Director of Marketing at 10 web an automated WordPress platform. She helped launch the 10 web and 10 web 2.0 solution on Product Hunt. She's partnered with App sumo and started new campaigns that generated 1000s of new users, and she's in charge of the steady growth of the company. With over six years of experience in different agencies. She brings different and UNCONVENTIONAL marketing
approaches to life. She's in charge of 20 digital marketing experts consisting of YouTube specialists, PR marketing professionals and an ads team. RX fosters an omnipresent marketing strategy that reaches out to her prospective customers through different and unexpected channels, advocating for more automation and web development. Hey, Araks, how you doing Welcome to the MindShift Podcast.
Hey there. Thank you for having me, Darrell. Very nice to be here.
Yeah, I'm glad you could join us. Where are you joining us from in the world today?
I'm currently actually Armenia.
Awesome. Wow, that's halfway around the world for me. That's good stuff. Yeah, well, I'm glad we had a chance to get together, we connected online. And I was really interested in the work that you guys are doing in your world in web design, and the WordPress website building world. But before we jump into that, with a bunch of questions that I have, I think people listening to this show who have a WordPress website are in for a treat today
with what they hear today. But tell us a little bit about your background before we get started.
Yeah, I've actually always worked in marketing for about 10 years now. I think, for the first seven years, I've been working in different agencies actually, I work like social media marketer, then I see a specialist and I was leading the team on different like digital marketing activities. And then I decided to move to Tampa, and work on a product to focus all of my knowledge and all my energy on promoting the product.
That's amazing. So social media marketing was your first love.
Yeah, I started with social media marketing, and like more website content. And then, as I was doing website content, I was I got a lot of interested in technical parts. So I moved to SEO, then it included email marketing, and then like everything in the digital strategy. So that's how I moved in all digital marketing processes.
That's interesting. Tell us about your role there with 10 Web.
At 10Web, I'm the Director of Marketing, I'm leading our marketing team. Actually, our marketing team is divided into five mini departments within let's say, so we are like about 1617 people. We do have PR team, we do have advertising team. We do have YouTube team, because we're actively doing q2.
That's amazing. So the work that you guys are doing, I really want to start to kind of dive in here. And my first question is, for any small business or entrepreneur out there, or even large business, everyone knows that WordPress has been the go to platform if you don't have technical skill, and you don't you know, you're not a custom code web developer.
Or if you don't have the funds to do that everyone has run to WordPress over the last decade and a half at least you know, since I've been in the business. However, WordPress presents some challenges, and your company is out to simplify some of those challenges. Let's talk a little bit about the vision that your company has around this idea of WordPress website building. Tell us a bit about that backstory.
Sure. We've been the workers market for a while now and we've seen and we've experienced all that challengers, like from the inside. And though we see that still 30 40% of the market are still choosing, like WordPress is their main CMS, their website. So we decided to make a WordPress better, like make it more easy, accessible and better working for our clients. That's why we are an automated WordPress platform. We do provide website building costing
and managing in one place. And it's all automated, you can automatically build websites with AI, you can automatically optimize your existing website and get 95 Google Pagespeed score and you can manage multiple websites for one very simple and user friendly dashboard.
So when you say automated, I got to play devil's advocate, because I've worked with businesses now over the last decade, more than a decade, and every one of them want something he's. So when you say automated, a lot of people think set it and forget it, push one button, and I'm done. Like some people listening to this. That's what they're thinking. Those of us who are in the business know that automation takes a bit more
to it. So talk to us a little bit about this idea of automating website building.
So when it comes to the website building part, yeah, we've automated with the help of AI. So basically, if you like any website, you can just copy paste the URL, and our AI will recreate your website and provide you a template that you can work on, you can change the images change the content, it makes your work way easier than just designing it from scratch or choosing a template that does not work for you.
That's pretty nifty. So you're saying you can copy and paste it and it starts to build a version of your website. So if you've got an existing website, you use your tool and it starts to build it based on the one that's there, does it build it based on a theme or a new template that's in your library?
Well, basically, if your website is not in WordPress, and you want to move it to WordPress, you can just copy the URL and it will identify the elements. And it will recreate the website on our builder, which is based on Elementor without copying any code. So just again, construct a website that you can just edit it easily with drag and drop editor, just add new sections, remove some sections that you don't like, add content, and just to get your website way quicker, then you'll do it manually.
I'm going to ask this for the listeners who are not technical people. And a marketer first, you know, I have learned a little bit of code. And I've built my own websites, obviously over the years, but that's certainly not my expertise. But for the listener who is not very tech savvy, and they're used to maybe working inside or maybe they've worked inside of an environment like Wix, or Squarespace, for
example. Maybe Shopify these, you know, self hosted all contained platforms, how does working inside of 10 web or working on WordPress in the 10 web system? How does that feel compared to, you know, some of those other platforms where everything is really, really simple and easy. How does yours compare?
Actually, when you get the website and you started thinking it's quite easy, it's just drag and drop system, you just pick the files that you want, and just drag it to the place that you want. And you can just add the content right on the page. It's super easy in eventing, there are a lot of tutorials that you can watch online, but super easy. It's just drag and drop method.
That's good, good to hear. I mean, I see a trend in the world of web design that is moving towards that I'm really concerned about web developers who are kind of stuck in the middle, I call it kind of Dead Man's Land using a term from tennis. And that is, if you're a coder, you're probably always going to have a job, you're always going to be okay, because there's always going to be a need for custom
development. But if you're one of those people who were just a theme developer, if you just took a theme and built it out for your customer, and charged a fair price for it, I think that's a gray area for a lot of, quote unquote, WordPress developers, if they're not able to write code, if they're not able to enhance the PHP, that
kind of thing. And because of the platforms like yours, and then you know, other ones that we mentioned prior, because at the end of the day, these platforms have a lot more money. They're publicly traded, if they're not publicly traded, they're well funded. And there's a segment of developers. So I think that's important. I think for a lot of people listening to this because consumers want easy. Like, I can tell you small businesses want easy. But let's transition to another topic,
though. Because just having a website isn't enough, right? Because everyone knows you have to have a website to have a brand presence online. But a lot of people come to us for at least and that is for the aspect of search engine optimization, like once the websites built, how do they get found? How do
they get customers? How do they get visibility, how the traffic to their website, how they generate leads, and probably 95%, if not more of small businesses have no idea that how fast the website performs both how it loads, and how it performs in terms of navigation and matters heavily to this day. And I know you guys spent some time working on that talk to us a little bit PageSpeed optimization, and how you guys see it and how you've addressed it in your platform?
Sure, it's actually been one of the main issues that we've seen in the market in the WordPress market especially. And it was a pain for us as well, because we are trying to get more traffic through SEO as well. And we just sit down with our engineers and we can we automate it or not. And basically, what we created is a unique solution that you can just if your website is already on WordPress, you can just download our plugin from our onboarding Google Search
Manager plugin. And now we will automatically create an optimized code copy of your website. And we actually guarantee 90 Plus PageSpeed score, both for mobile and desktop. So we do all the things that usually a developer would do manually and work on it for days, or even sometimes weeks and do it automatically, where like, for some things I can mention, like technical aspects, we did just minify just says, We enable Lazy Load optimized images, there are hundreds of other things that go there.
Alright, Roxy, you just got advanced on him slow down. Yeah, you said minified. CSS. And so for those of you listening, she's about to go deep on you real quick. So let me slow, slow down for just a second. So PageSpeed optimization, let's back up there for just a second, you said 90 Plus PageSpeed optimization kind of guaranteed. Let's stop there for a second, what's significant about a 90 PageSpeed optimization score?
Yeah. And basically, when it comes to the load time, as you said, it's very important, because there are statistics that show that if your website loads, more than three seconds, your can use up to 40 42% of their customers right away, which is horrible. But the 90 Plus PageSpeed score, oh, if we check with Google, it's one of the green side. So it's the fast working website, the fastest working websites have 90 plus PageSpeed score.
And it's usually the main issue here is, especially the mobile, we've been working quite hard on the mobile part as well, because fast load time on mobile is way harder to get than on desktop. So we achieved that. And we can now guarantee that if you like migrate your website at 10Web, you will automatically get a nine page postcard both for your desktop and for mobile.
I love the word guarantee, I also get a little skeptical when I hear guarantees. Yeah. And I've been around the business a long time. I've installed and loaded and built through our agency, hundreds of websites. And we've always sought to optimize PageSpeed. Let me ask this question. So when you say the 90 Plus PageSpeed? Is that at the time of the migration from whatever they're using into your
platform? Or are you saying that your company's platform can keep the website updated to where it's at 90 Plus, at all times? Is that what you're saying?
Well, let me address the guarantee part and move to this because of our connected, okay, if somehow something is wrong with the website, and the code is very like draw can and we don't get like we get 85 not 90 are Developers Manual, we work on your website to fix that. And we implement that in the product as well to later on, have it automatically.
So you're telling me that if I move my site today, and it comes in at 8085, that someone is on your side actually going to take a look at that site and get it up to 90?
Yes.
Are you serious?
Yes.
So let me put that in perspective. Listeners, if you're listening to this, let me explain some tea. That's interesting. And it's huge, because number one, a typical website, developer, WordPress developer, or whatever word you want to use, not just a builder, not just someone who builds a website, but someone who knows how to optimize a website.
They're typically in the marketplace here in the United States, they're going to be charging, probably minimum $75 An hour $250 An hour to go in and do technical code enhancements. And that's just what I call it, or basically optimization on these dozens of
things that can go wrong. And for those of you that are not sure what all goes into page speed optimization, or website optimization, as relates to PageSpeed score, there are multiple tools online, all of them are free to use the one that I would recommend maybe Iraq's would recommend another one. But you can just simply Google, Google PageSpeed Insights, and plug in your website and let Google run the tool for you. And it'll give you
a breakdown. So without getting super technical, and you don't have to really get crazy about it because they make it really simple. Just like when you're driving a car green light means go yellow light means caution. Red light means stop. They give you scores, and they put all these technical things in these categories. They're red, they're yellow, and they're green. Green means good. Yellow means you need to pay attention. Red means
you're in trouble. Is there another tool you would use for someone listening for them to check their PageSpeed?
Now, I think Google PageSpeed Insights are a great tool. I can mention GT metrics as well, but it's more technical, I think. So we'll go PageSpeed Insights
I love GT metrics.
Yeah.
But I think it's important GT metrics is another great tool. It's also free.
Yeah.
And again, when you're listening to this audience, your job isn't to understand what every word means. Your job is to understand if it's green, you're okay. If it's yellow, it's something you need to take a look at. If it's
red, you've got a problem. And these tools are those sort of this, like the X ray system, for your website, if you think about going to the doctor, and the doctor says, There's something wrong with your insides, but we can't just open you up and start finding out they just don't cut you open to find out what's wrong, they run you through an x ray machine, and they look at the screen. That's what this is telling you. They give you some ideas. Let's go back to I stopped at PageSpeed
optimization guarantee. So go back to the guarantee bar. You were talking about that?
Yeah. And you, you were asking what if the score goes down during your website, like posting at 10. Basically, we to value our customer support a lot. And we do have 24/7 live chat, you can always reach out and our developers will always take a look, see what caused the score to go down, maybe you've uploaded some plugin that is quite heavy or uploaded some video or something is wrong, they will take a look and give you a solution and help you with a solution.
That's amazing. This conversation is a conversation about the opportunity available through automated website building. And I wanted to rocks on the call because being in this space every single day working with small business owners now for the last 11 years. And I can't tell you how many websites we've built. I can't tell you how many have been hacked, I can't tell you how many we have had to restore, I can't tell you how
many we have optimized. It's just so it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds my interest in this topic is that the world of WordPress is an easy place to run because it is really the best place to go. When you want to build a website for search engine optimization, you can put in almost any plugin you want, you can tie it to your email marketing system and solution loads of lead generation tools. But with great capabilities sometimes come
great problems. And that is these areas of concern are problems that a lot of people don't know about when you install a plugin, you don't understand how that plugin was built. You might want the functionality, but it may be a very heavy plugin, I call it heavy coded plugin, and it could weigh your site down and you don't even know it was just that one plug in that could be weighing your site. And that's what you're talking about.
Right? Other things that can happen is you install something like a free theme from WordPress or a free plugin somewhere in the WordPress directory. And that developer doesn't update the theme or doesn't update the security. And someone hacks your website through the security breach or through the security flaw. And it was a free theme. And a lot of times your business is running on this tool. And so
I think we're moving today. And what I think our next company is looking to solve is to help not only have a better website, but make it easier for you to manage as a small business owner number to have aI which is data and for without going too crazy. Talk a little bit about if you can rocks, the AI capabilities that you guys are pulling data from and how it benefits the end user in your world.
Oh well, basically with mainly community to AI for a couple of things. One of which is when a lot of people want to move to WordPress from other platforms, quite time consuming. Sometimes it's almost seemed impossible. Yes. So basically decided that with the help of AI, anyone can move to WordPress and experience all the
benefits of WordPress. And basically, we collected a lot of that data, analyze a lot of websites and our AI understands the segments, the headings and just creates that exact pages. Sure, if you don't have authority over that website, you need to change the content of the images. But if it's your website, you can just keep it and we're not copying getting caught. It's just build on WordPress and on power builder, a drag and drop builder that you
can easily access. The other use of AI is just to have any template that you want, can especially work for agencies as well, like for bringing any like templates for their clients. And for any like SMB owner as well. Like if they like any website, they can just copied with the help of and then change the content and images and customize it a little bit they want to.
So when someone is done building in your world on WordPress, do they still have to go in and do you know, we recommend that all of our clients go into their website once a week and make sure all the plugins are updated? Does your platform do any of that for them when you say automated or do they still need to go in and update plugins? Do they still need to go in and update the theme every so often? All of these are the types of things that can cause vulnerabilities on a website that can land you
in a hack. And you know, one of the thing that I'll mention is you don't have to have a really big A website or be getting hundreds of 1000s of visitors or millions of visitors a month to your website for you to be a target for a hack. Because computer systems that go looking to hack a website, they don't care how big your website is, they're looking for
vulnerability. So if they can find vulnerability on a five page website for a local massage parlor, or a restaurant, well, they'll find one, and they'll break in your website. And it's just a computer algorithm that's a robot that's trying to break in your website. It's not a human to human who sent the
robot. But talk a little bit about the maintenance requirements after the websites on your platform Do they still have to go in and update plugins every week, or that's just what we recommend themes and things of that nature?
Well, basically, if we have built the website with Canva, and haven't moved from our website, we build it with the help of our widgets and our plugin so they get
automatically updated. But if you've moved from other platform, and you have like other plugins that you are using, we do have automatic security scanning, then you can schedule and it scans all the plugins all the vulnerabilities and just shows you all the issues and you can just check it once in a while to see if there are any issues you will see in the security section of your tablet dashboard. If there is an
that's very interesting, and I'm I hit you with this off the top of your head. I don't know if you know or not. But you know, inside WordPress websites, there are some traditional plugins that you see floating around the world of WordPress that are almost common. They're like Staples, like you can't start a WordPress website and not put some of these plugins in. Does your platform eliminate any plugins that they may already have on their current WordPress website? So let's talk WordPress
to WordPress. I'm going to go out there and say Yoast SEO for example, Yoast SEO is one of the top SEO plugins it's free. They have a free and a paid version. But it's very, very popular in the world of SEO, does your platform include any of those top and that's just one of many, I don't want to get into a long list. But does your platform come with certain plugins like that. So someone wouldn't need Yoast or WP cache or some of these other ones without getting crazy technical.
Actually, we do provide 30 Plus plugins that have been in the market for a while, we do have our SEO plugin, which works basically quite similar to yours with from the caching point, we do have our own cache, which is from hosting site which we recommend using because it's one of the features of the high PageSpeed as well. But you can always use any plugin that you want, you can upload any plugin and without any issue.
Wow, that's pretty good. And I think that's the danger of building a WordPress website. I mean, WordPress was initially set up as a blog. Yeah. You know, it was a blog, it was for blogging, it wasn't for building websites, it wasn't for having ecommerce and all these other things. But the beauty of it is it was a great foundation. And obviously creativity and ingenuity and technology has allowed for you to just build whatever you want
with WordPress. But of course, with that opportunity to build comes all of these other sort of risks and challenges. There's anyone else trying to do this and make things simpler, because that's really your goal is to make things simpler for the website owner.
Yeah, basically, Wordpress, I haven't noticed, like direct competitor, that they are doing the same, especially with a builder and automatic nine plus PageSpeed. Optimization. There are a lot of hosting companies in WordPress, yeah, great hosting company. There are a lot of builders, a lot of themes, a lot of plugins,
right a lot. But like with a builder with nine plus PageSpeed, score optimization, and all that comes with a very high quality of thing that's powered by Google Cloud, there is no platform at this moment that I'm aware of.
I'm glad you're out there doing it. I mean, I was intrigued when your team reached out to us and anything AI today, I think anyone has not paying attention to how AI is coming into and weaving its way into your world, whatever your world is, you know, I think it's something that everyone needs to pay attention to. And we're going to do a lot more coverage of that. On this show and a lot
of different topics. I want to talk to you a bit of personally now what got you inspired to get into the world of digital marketing in the first place.
Actually, I think when I was studying in the university, it was probably my lecturer, who was like in marketing and I got inspired because all the other stuff that I was learning, I was in like management, and I was learning economics, finances, accounting, and I even tried in accounting, but it was way too boring for me. Sorry to all the accountants.
Tell me about it.
Yeah.
I have a degree in finance and I know it's boring.
Yeah. Yeah, actually, I've done my masters in finance as well. And like it's not for me. I found I decided to go to marketing because it combines two of my favorite things it has created with me and also is based on like, different data that is more mathematical. And for example, SEO is way more technical, but it combines technical and creative part of the way because As I like both of them, it was the perfect choice. For me.
That's nice. What's the most challenging thing that you face on a day to day basis in your role as the head of marketing. So let's talk about your role as the head of marketing for a SaaS product, a hosting company, what's your toughest challenge as the head of marketing?
Probably, it's to be quick and coming with coming up with decisions. In, especially in new companies, you need to be extra quick, and you need to be able to make right decisions very quickly. And if you make wrong ones, you need to learn from them very quickly, because you need to grow very quickly and to let people know about your company. Because the competition though, as I said, we don't have like a direct competitor. But the market is quite saturated. And now you need to move fast.
Yeah, how big is your team? 16 people? Is that company wide or just in your marketing department?
No, in a marketing company, why we're 74?
Okay, nice, very nice. So really decent sized company really picking up some speed. And you guys started when
we started doing basis on the product was launched in 2019. We actually recently just closed our seed round, we got funded with 2 million from Sierra ventures and add fun, and were pick it up just fast exponential growth.
Gotta move fast. If you're not familiar with the world of getting funded in VC world, it sounds good until you get the money, and you get the money. And then you gotta go. You gotta go. Let me ask this question. You're a b2b company. You're not? Or are you selling? You're selling b2c? And b2b? Is that correct?
Yes. Most of our marketing activities are focused on b2b market, like a freelancer some agencies, but we do have personal and premium plans that include one website are free website. So intrapreneurs SMBs, can use that as well.
Gotcha. What's the most successful marketing strategy or tactic you've used in the last six months?
Probably, I will say YouTube, it's been not not six months, that it's been like a year that we've been doing YouTube very actively, we publish one video per week. And we also do separate YouTube advertising as well. And basically, we noticed that a lot of competitors, they're scared to go to YouTube, it takes a lot of time, a lot of energy to create content there. So we decided to take that level kitchen, do that. And now we have ARIA to Tim is like seven
people. And with cameraman with editor with, like, presenters, YouTubers, and it works quite well, it brings a lot of organic traffic as well as we do YouTube ads, with just direct platform, and we do a lot of testing with video content has been a great tool for us. Because the tool is quite like complex, and it's way easier to explain in video.
Such a good point, when you have something that's complex, it's better to show not tell. Yeah, right. Yeah, for those of you listening, it doesn't matter if it's a product company, if you sell a complex service or have a complex system, it's better to show not tell, demonstrate, we say my agency, let's if we can demonstrate it, let's demonstrate it as opposed to try to explain it. That way, you can capture a couple of modalities of the brain and the learning modality of how we learn both
visual and an audio. And if they can get in and demonstrate it that adds that third kinesthetic level. So very good, very good. RX. If we were sitting here three years from today, I'm just I always like to ask people like this, this idea of the future, like if we were sitting here three years from today, and you were looking back, and you are saying, Man, this last three years has been absolutely amazing. You know, you're in a startup, you've gotten funded, you're growing the company, you
got to a team of 16. In your marketing department, what would make her acts really, really happy three years from now looking back, what would make you say, man, we really knocked it out of the park.
Yeah, I would like us to become a billion dollar company, how it will sound and help a lot of people, a lot of companies, a lot of business owners to really don't stress over their websites, and just focus on their business. I just would like to know that we've accomplished that in three years.
Okay, nice. On the outside looking in, I know I work with a number of companies that have been funded, you know, non funded, funded, I work with some angel capital investors and etc. I want to know if it's true or false, that when you're working in a startup, you work 80 hours a week,
Basically, depends it depends that you need to move fast. It can actually our culture, it's quite working culture is quite to nice and we do have like, a lot of great established processes. Sometimes you need to do some work like that's out of your work time, but it's basically more on the management lever level rather on the employee level.
That's good. I like your founders they don't kill you. Yeah. They're like, No, they don't. Yeah. Be efficient. You need time off. It's super important, right? Yeah. I've never worked inside of an actual startup product development startup. I've had startups in the service world plenty but but yeah, it's really important. I know my companies, we are like, look, we're going to work really hard for five days. And we need to unplug.
Yeah, on the weekend. There are some times when if you're a management, there's a little bit of carryover, but you're not gonna get anywhere fast if you just burn through for sure. You know, energy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So very good. RX. Where do you want people to connect with you? If they're interested? If they're curious about the work that you guys are doing? If they're curious about this automated WordPress platform thing, if they're frustrated with all the plugins that they
have? And maybe they didn't even know that PageSpeed was a big deal. Now they know how would you want them to get a little closer to the work you guys do and learn a little bit more?
Sure, they can always check out our website 10 that IO, it's super easy. And if they have any equations, we always have like 24/7 live chat, and our agents will be very happy to chat with them and help them move and think and if anyone would like to talk directly with me, they can always reach me out on LinkedIn. I think we will live the link and they can always reach out and I'll be happy to help.
That's amazing. Thank you for your generosity their final question I always ask my guests and that is if for whatever reason your time on this beautiful place we call Earth ended tonight and you were not able to be here tomorrow. What would you want everyone to remember you for?
I think it's interesting question. I would love to everyone for to think of me like someone that my coworkers usually tell this especially when we were not on remote places that always bring smile even at the stressful days. So I would always like to everone to think that
that's amazing Max, thank you so much for being here on The MindShift Podcast
Thank you for the invite it was great.
Hey, my friend, thanks again for listening to today's episode of the mind shift podcast. Listen, let's not have the conversation in here. Connect with me on social at Mr. Darrell Evans on almost all the platforms. Until next week, remember you're just one shift away from the breakthrough you're looking for.